1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a print-job distribution program, a printer program and corresponding methods.
2. Description of the Related Art
Modern businesses and other organisations often provide communal printers for use by staff over a LAN. Administration of these resources is typically provided through a server, such as a print server for controlling printers. The print server is provided to distribute print jobs arriving from different client terminals operated by different users, and will usually provide a print queue for controlling the order in which print jobs are printed. At the client side, at least one application with a print function is provided and a printer driver is also provided. The printer driver is a printer specific software application provided to convert a print job into a page description language that is understandable by the model of printer that the driver is specific to. In a network in which several different types of printer are provided, a printer driver will typically be provided at each client computer for each different type of printer to be used by the client computer.
A print job, mentioned above, is formed of print content, which contains information concerning the image to be printed, and print attributes, which contain information about how an image is to be printed.
An example of use of the above-described printing system will be described below.
A user has prepared a word-processed document and wishes to print the document. The user selects a print option screen from within menus of his or her word processor. The print option screen provides the user with an interface to set print options identifying which parts of the document the user wishes to print (current page, all pages etc.). At this stage, the user inputs settings to identify the content to be sent to the printer. From the print option screen a further option is provided to set properties of the printer. If the properties option is selected, a driver user interface is displayed, which allows specific printer settings such as finishing settings (stapling, hole punching etc.) or paper source (tray to be used for printing) settings to be made.
Once the user has made his settings and selected print from within the word processor, the print driver processes the print job to produce a print job in a page description language understood by the printer to which the job is to be sent. The print job is sent to the print server, where it enters a queue for forwarding to the printer. When the print job reaches the front of the print queue for the printer, the print server forwards the print job to the printer and the printer prints the output print job.
In this conventional arrangement, each client computer (hereinafter “client”) in an office needs to have printer drivers installed for each printer to which the client is to print. If printing at a printer becomes undesirable for any reason (for example intensive use of the printer by other users), a print job cannot generally be re-routed to another printer because different printers may not be configured to receive output jobs according to the same page description language. Therefore, it is necessary to “re-print” the print job from the software application. Further, even if some printers can understand the same page description language, different printer models or setups may support different finishings (hole punching, stapling, etc.) so that there is no guarantee that an output print job sent to one printer will be satisfactorily printed by another printer.